Tainted Love and Painters' Muses at the local video store near you

I am currently living in a house with a giant television set and not much else.  I decided not to hook up to cable and instead, to rent movies until a good part of that giant list of "films I'd been meaning to get around to seeing but hadn't"  was worked down.  I figure it will take most of the summer.  An 11: 00 PM late show and a glass of wine is a great way to end the day.

Yes, I know about NetFlicks and yes, it would be cheaper to download.  Polyester is easier to look after than silk, you can have a starter marriage and trade up in five years, the furniture at the Brick would be cheaper than shipping the stuff I have in storage, driving is faster and more expedient than a bike and President's Choice has all kinds of bag salad and frozen entrees that are fine in a pinch.  However I am committed to small, local video stores the way I'm committed to local booksellers, small, private retail, home cooking, rickety antique furniture, bicycling or walking instead of driving, disintegrating vintage clothing of natural fibres and true, lasting, faithful, mutually committed love, the kind that never dies: built on trust, respect, shared interests, value, goals, affections, passion and a proper courtship.  I am committed in a hopeless romantic, impractical, quality of life, Holy Grail kind of way. Sometimes the thing that is a a little hard to find or have is the one worth having. I am not a "settling" kind of girl.

The video store in my neighbourhood is a Rogers outlet.  Very clean, very large, lots of snacks and recent films, nice young staff and hardly any back catalog of old films.  It's fine for the recent Oscar nominees you missed, but its the rental equivalent of that guy your well-meaning friend from university sets you up with:  beige pants, a job, a car, a degree and nothing to talk about.

This week, in a compare and contrast consumer move, I headed back down to my old 'hood and into Queen Video. They have at least two locations:  one near Bloor and Bathurst and one near Queen and Spadina. The store is small.  They don't sell food.  The directors they carry are listed on the window.  The inside is painted black:  like a theatre.  It's the video equivalent of the guy who will never be rich and never be boring. Toronto has a few good, private video rental outlets. In Winnipeg, there was a great place called Village Video which I understand is going to be demolished for a bigger Shoppers' Drug Mart. It's too bad.

The 7 day rental rate for three films at Queen Video is $4.00 less than the 7 day rental rate for three films at Rogers, but that is not the main reason to shop there. Queen Video gave me a membership back when I first moved to Toronto 25 years ago.  A new university grad, I had no bank credit card, which many places required back then to rent a movie.  Not Queen Video:  I lived around the corner in the apartment over the bank at Queen and Spadina and that was good enough for them.

Queen Video has nearly everything somewhere and a staff that knows where to find it. There's a woman working at Bloor and Bathurst who has been there since I was living on Spadina all those years ago.  I think she has a PhD in film from the U of T.  Films based on books by Proust:  "we'll dig them up." That obscure South Asian film that won at Cannes a few years back:  "yes of course."

This week, I finally got around to seeing "Love is the Devil",  a BBC production from 1997 featuring Derek Jacobi as the famous English  painter Francis Bacon and a young Daniel Craig as Bacon's much younger, booze-addled, drug-addicted, petty criminal lover George Dyer. The film manages to convey Bacon's own disturbing yet beautiful visual aesthetic as an overriding cinematic motif while showing a truly awful relationship between two men who love and abuse each other both in and out of the bedroom. Bacon is portrayed here as a sub in the bedroom who publicly tortures and humiliates his Dom, a younger man of lower social status and far less education who is financially and emotionally dependent on him. As Dyer, Craig manages to leak emotional damage from every pore. The performance is a brilliant evocation of a man in so much pain it hurts to watch him.

The other film I saw this week was equally disturbing but for entirely different reasons.  Rogers had "Midnight In Paris", Woody Allan's latest offering, which was highly praised for its romantic view of Paris in the 1920s and the salon of painters and writers resident there in the period.  Allan's evocation of the past was truly charming.  On the other hand, he's filming in Paris, a city that is beautiful at nearly every turn. The costumes and sets were lovely and he has a great cast in a series of cameos of famous artists and writers. Really who wouldn't want to go for drinks at Gertrude Stein's ( Kathy Bates as the only woman of any intellectual substance in the entire film other than a museum guide at Versailles) or with Fitzgerald or Hemingway?

As is so often the case with Allan, the couple at the centre of the story is comprised of  two people who  are equally distasteful characters and so poorly matched that anyplace other than a Woody Allan movie they would never have gotten past a second date.

We are supposed to believe the solipsistic and neurotic screenwriter has fallen in love with a bubbly and bubble-headed bourgeois girl who lives to shop. The dialogue between them is mostly so stilted and brittle I scarcely believed they ever got into the sack never mind into an engagement. No one over the age of 12 could lack the insight required to see these two are equally awful and woefully ill-suited.

The frustrated novelist wanders the streets of Paris late at night until he meets and falls in love with an imaginary Frenchwoman, the muse (and mistress) to a few painters. It is a great credit to Cotillard that she makes a meal of an insubstantial character.

Even the considerable charms of Owen Wilson couldn't sell me on the putz at the core of this story.  When he steals his fiance's jewellery to give it to another woman I wanted him to get the great romance of a night in a Paris prison.  I'm sure a French judge could have explained why it's wrong on every level to steal your girlfriend's jewellery to give to your mistress.

Allegedly MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is a film about the folly of nostalgia, of wanting to live in the past. Allan's last few outings have made me wonder what world he's living in. Woody Allan is now old:  very, very old and his views of women are so mired in some kind of 1950's misogyny, I now find it impossible to swallow my distaste when I watch them.

Then there's the rich middle-aged guy thinking he prostituted his art without any real look at what choosing art for a living means for most of us who do. Hemingway and Modigliani were starving in Paris during the period Allan depicts here.  They were in cafes because those Montmartre garrets were unheated. I wanted Hemingway to talk about what his decision to write cost him, what he gave up to earn his career that eventually became lucrative. At that point, Porter, Stein and Fitzgerald would have been buying him dinner.

Rent it for the scenery and the subplot but don't expect a great film or any great insights into male-female relationships, the economics of choosing art for a living or human nature.

Next up for me  is TIME REGAINED, a film of the last volume of Proust's famous novel "In Search of Lost Time".  I'll see Paris again and this time through the eyes of the French, which I am truly looking forward to.  I will also check out one of the shows currently on offer at CanStage on Monday.

Happy Easter or Passover,  gentle readers.  I'll speak with you again next week.